Page 200 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

THE EDISON OF MEDICINE

ventures and have even encouraged commercialization by launching
incubators and accelerators, there are still mixed feelings about such
activities at many places that lack MIT’s established entrepreneurial
culture. And in the corporate world, it’s highly unusual for scientists
to become deeply involved in commercialization.

Make licenses contingent on using the technology
If a firm doesn’t make use of technology it has licensed from the lab,
it can be made to relinquish the license. And consider how the wafer
for treating brain tumors came to market: A company uninterested
in the treatment happened to buy the firm that had licensed the tech-
nology. MIT got it to agree to launch a start-up to develop the wafer
in return for a lower licensing fee. Few universities—or companies—
manage their patents as aggressively as MIT does. Consequently,
many of their potentially useful discoveries aren’t exploited.

Forge a Collaborative Multidisciplinary Team
A team working on an oral drug-delivery device that could sit in the
stomach gradually releasing medicine for weeks or months came
up with a star-shaped design. Then a mechanical engineer with
modeling experience joined the effort and began to ask questions.
Why had the team chosen a star? Why not other shapes? The team
evaluated several possibilities, including hexagons and a variety of
stars, and found that a six-pointed star performed best in terms of its
ability to fit inside a capsule and stay in the stomach. The new team
member also raised considerations about the stiffness of the arms
and center, the strength of the elastomer at the interface, and the
size of the unfolded device. This turned the conversation to materi-
als that might enable the device to last longer.
“That’s what happens when you bring together folks with differ-
ent backgrounds,” says Giovanni Traverso, a Harvard gastroenterol-
ogist, biomedical engineer, and MIT research affiliate who heads the
team. “It leads to new insights and new ways of thinking about the
problem.” The teams at Langer Lab include chemical, mechanical,
and electrical engineers; molecular biologists; medical clinicians;

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